What is morality for?

Psychologist Robert Kurzban uses the principles of evolution by natural selection to understand human social behavior. More specifically, he looks at the strategic function of morality—why people are moral or virtuous, and the reasons we judge the acts of others as right or wrong. He also studies why we developed a psychological mechanism that leads us to want to punish those who commit wrongful acts.Learn more about Rob's research →

Journal Articles

We bring together this interdisciplinary body of research and review the main theories that have been proposed to explain human prosociality, with an emphasis on kinship, reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, punishment, and morality.
— Annual Review of Psychology

By focusing on disputants' actions, bystanders can dynamically change which individuals they support across different disputes, simultaneously solving the problems of coordination and exploitation.
— Psychological Bulletin

We review empirical evidence regarding the operation of these systems, discuss the causes of cultural and individual differences in their outputs, and sketch their computational architecture.
— Behavioral and Brain Sciences